“As extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being.”

It seems a little strange that Marshall McLuhan, the tutelary spirit of the Information Age, failed to foresee the Internet in much the form that we know it today. Signs of that medium were not lacking in his day, but, busy pondering the relative merits of furniture vis-à-vis the derrière, the meaning of miniskirts, and the relevance of Shakespeare to the modern era (thus prefiguring Hollywood’s rediscovery of the Bard as a pop-culture hero), McLuhan paid the wired future less mind than he did the old-school medium of television, an “extension of man” far more manageable than the space- and time-shrinking Net has turned out to be.

Ours is a media-driven age, and even if the dominant media are not exactly the ones that McLuhan pondered in a body of highly influential work, everywhere you look in the literature of technology you will find McLuhan’s strange, contradictory, and often misquoted ideas. Many of them first found expression in Understanding Media, which mystified many readers on its publication in 1964 but began to make more sense as those media consolidated, integrated horizontally and vertically, and became ever more dominant, especially in the realm of advertising, in the late 1970s.

Understanding Media announced themes that McLuhan would revisit in many other books: the dehumanizing powers of technology, the constant presence of the media in areas of life hitherto mostly sheltered from them (bedroom, boardroom), the disappearance of borders and cultural divisions even as humankind becomes ever more tribalized. Think Yugoslavia, which exploded about the time the Internet became accessible to mere civilians: here McLuhan was right on the mark, and in that regard his term “global village,” coined in that book, was not without its ominous aspects.

To advance these themes, McLuhan mastered a perfectly appropriate rhetoric, the sound bite. “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.” “The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures.” “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.”

That was very cool stuff in the slogan-happy 1960s, even if not everyone bought McLuhan’s vatic utterances; as Daniel Bell remarks in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, McLuhan’s ideas “are not meant to be used analytically, or tested by some empirical means. . . . All in all, Marshall McLuhan was an advertising man’s dream, in more ways than one.” It’s worth noting, too, that McLuhan went to his grave complaining that no one grokked his most famous slogan, “The medium is the message.”

McLuhan never bothered, however, to spell out just what he meant by it and then stick to a single definition, which slipperiness helped his reputation as new-age sage in his time but has made him that much harder to read in the decades since. Instead, he advanced the “laws of media,” which state that media technologies at once amplify aspects of our culture and make previously amplified sectors obsolete, becoming something else entirely in the process, as with television, which amplifies the visual, makes radio obsolete by co-opting its sound, recovers pictures that had been made obsolete by the rise of printed alphabets, and mutates into, say, Web TV or the GUI-driven computer.

Does that clear it up? Probably not. Certainly not. But we moderns, surrounded by the high noise and low signal of media meant to capture and captivate the lowest common denominator, are all members of McLuhan’s tribe. In our time, form determines content. In our time, the invisibility and everywhere-at-onceness of those media make them more powerful than earlier forms of communication, which is why their owners are always seeking ways to make the media even more transparent, omnipresent, and “realistic.” Thus it is that the awful countenance of Donald “Ozymandias” Trump is so much among us. Oblique and perhaps half-correct though it may be, Understanding Media remains an owner’s manual of a kind, and it is well worth revisiting and arguing with 45 years later.

(Always worth a fresh viewing, too, is Woody Allen‘s wonderful film Annie Hall, in which Marshall McLuhan makes a memorable guest appearance, for which see the video below.)